The first thing I meant is ‘authenticity’ – Everything he does is driven by exuberance for a belief system that he consistently advocates…

The second thing I meant is ’simplicity’. Hugh has reduced the entire proposition down to an animated icon and a promise.  As someone whose ‘business’ is words, crafting “Stories about Strategy” I am in awe of the suggestive power of images to cut across our reservations.  Disagreements about words become a cause of demolition.  Disagreements about images are an excuse for construction.

The third thing I meant is ‘directness’.  There is a ‘buy my stuff’ abruptness to the execution which is disarming to a 19th Century Brit like me…

The fourth thing I meant is that there is an ‘aggression’ of conceptualisation. I have written elaborately in the past on memetic branding, along with Mike Cayley and also on brands as producers of connectivity.  In Hugh’s mind brands simply become ‘Cannons’ puffing out memetic cannon balls… the visual language removes the need for analytical and captures the essence of the idea.  More importantly, it is a productive, energetic and kinetic image, which makes brand owners feel as if they are in control.

Fifthly  I was evoking ‘commitment’. Hugh’s basic concept here, as I see it, is to move away from a typical agency focus on the production process, and also to move away from a consultancy focus on outcomes. Instead he confidently assumes the outcomes and trusts his track record for the production process, and focuses instead on the ’stuff’ itself.

Any traditional agency could think this strategic insight but none that I know would commit to the idea so far as to name the business after the process.  They’d be too busy trying to define some much looser discriminator based on ‘modes of engagement’ – or just name it after the founder. Not Hugh.

So Blatancy rules. Underthink and Overcommit. This is the spirit of the age.

#SocialObjectFactory, is the ur-zeitgeist.

I’ll say it once more for effect: “Innovation is Simplification”.

*And on a related note, in my defence, I defer, once again, to Humpty Dumpty:

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master that’s all.”

Incidentally, Crashpadder is surely by far the better name

Interested to see what Dan dares next…

New Scientist (meeting Chomsky to PR his new book):

In your new book, you suggest that many components of human nature are just too complicated to be really researchable.

Chomsky

That’s a pretty normal phenomenon. Take, say, physics, which restricts itself to extremely simple questions. If a molecule becomes too complex, they hand it over to the chemists. if it becomes too complex for them, they hand it over to the biologists. And if the system is too complex for them, they hand it to the psychologists…and so on until it ends up in the hands of historians or novelists. As you deal with more and more complex systems it becomes harder and harder to find deep and interesting properties.

The second snippet that struck me was a five page article, speculating on improvements to the  Standard model of physics.  Stringballs, Tetraquarks, Glueballs, Inflatons, Pomerons, Leptoquarks, Winos and Anyons are all speculated as additions to our basic model of Physics, which already explains – (drumroll) nothing. Even if the Higgs Boson is found and we finally understand why things we can see have weight; even is String theory is proved and we understand how weight leads to gravity; even if supersymmetry is proven and we understand where 80% of ‘other inert stuff’ comes from that doesn’t fit the model. Even if I could understand what any of this meant…

Chomsky is still right.

We must respond as humanly and obscurely as possible…

Over to Basho:

“Furu ike ya

Kawaza tobikomu

Mizu no oto”

Translations here: including from Allan Ginsberg

Hmmm.  What else could I graphify?

The presentation described a move from brand opacity (hiding knowledge to build brand premiums) through translucency (offering sneak peeks to support brand story telling), to fully-fledged transparency (a free and open information exchange with stakeholders).

Transparency is a founding principle of RightSideUp (RSU) thinking and the most critical enabler of social markets.

But actually the relationship between RSU and transparency goes even deeper. There’s a two-way relationship going on here.

Transparency is both enabled by VRM (which restores information and social symmetry between individuals and institutions) but it also drives the need for VRM, as any remaining asymmetries stand out like beacons of inequity, demanding ever more efficient matching services on behalf of the individual.

In principle, at least, this will create a virtuous circle of ever more transparent and trustworthy relationships.

Transparent individuals want transparent products which match their precise needs and social context.

But such richly transparent products can only be produced by transparent organisations which share their product backstory, seeking to combine both brand principles and supply-web production processes.

Inevitably though, transparent organisations’ self interest lies in creating transparent markets where their true stories can be selected over their rivals’ over-bundled half-truths and obfuscations.

Closing the systems loop, these transparent markets are the ones in which social and information democracy prevail – in which individuals are enabled to both share and benefit from their personal assets – the underlying principles of VRM.

RightSideUpness is thus embedded at the centre of the Transparency system and the Transparency system is, to my mind, an inevitability.

Make no mistake. Transparency is already here. We are seeing  a proliferation of stakeholder to stakeholder, stakeholder to enterprise and enterprise-wide ‘mutual marketing’ tools to make it work for us not against us.

Back in 2008 I suggested the next decade will be a race between Microsoft/Google vs Oracle/SAP to provide the infrastructure for a see-through world.

I had not foreseen the exponential rise of Facebook.  And more importantly I had not foreseen the open economy which is created by micro-applications operating to common interoperability protocols, with personal data-sharing at their heart.

In 2008 I suggested ‘Find’ would be the new killer app.  This was a glib expression of a deeper truth, that merely identifying information would be trivial but that the productivity of insight is what drives progress.  This is a function of the trust of social networks and of the decision flows they share.

From supply-chain cleansing to product innovation and customer mediation, all multi-stakeholder processes depend upon trust in the quality, integrity and linkage of decision-making. Shared, transparent decisionflow is the metaprocess that underpins mutual accountability.

Data and decisions; decisions and data. These are the building blocks of brand integrity.

“In 2012 we hope not to shrink, by instinctively guessing what our customers want and gambling on a portfolio of more than 100 incremental improvement projects reflecting well-established management priorities.  To support this diversified innovation strategy, we will invest in a variety of tools to generate unprecedented levels of data which we will store in secure organisational silos until such time as they may be useful.  We will foster a climate of mutual consultation and multi-stakeholder project oversight without meddlesome intervention.  In our ongoing quest for middle management accountability, we will ruthlessly scrutinise the business case for any substantive change and so avoid any unnecessary disruption to customers’ experience. To fuel this strategy we will cut unnecessary operational resources which may undermine trust by engaging in direct customer interaction. We will promote internal dialogue through the latest social media techniques to ensure that the whole organisation can engage in debating the future direction of the business, thus creating a collective accountability for the inexplicable inertia which has arisen as a result of the challenging economic environment.”

We are living through a plague of undecision…grrr…

As in any maturing market, there is an ongoing tension between the heavy weight of the vertically integrated systems that kick-started this assurance infrastructure, and the paper-thin, but tightly laminated layers of process that now support it.

The many-celled structure that we have now is undoubtedly costly and cumbersome and may still not be delivering the assurance that’s required.

The Sustainability team does a good job of starting to unbundle both the functions and outcomes of assurance systems and so begins to reveal some of the inefficiencies, opacities and redundancies of so many overlapping schemes.

They don’t suggest that labels and certifications are to be made redundant, but they do imply that the provision of Credibility is an exercise in the gathering, auditing, assuring and communication of non-financial impact; and that each of these is a specialist task, susceptible to optimisation; and that all might be rebundled in new and more resilient ways.

We live in a fast-maturing market for Credibility, when values-based claims are increasingly susceptible to investigation.  Any entity, or set of entities seeking to make judgemental claims of a product must assess its risk from two standpoints.

Firstly, what is the assurance-value inherent in that claim, compared to others’ claims? i.e. How much value are consumers investing in the claims being made?

Secondly, what is the scepticism-risk inherent within the trust network of that claim? i.e. How likely is it that a sceptical observer would find a claim dishonest, or disingenuous.

Where risk and value intersect, rational judgements can be made about the breadth and depth of the reassurance to be provided.

There is a third issue though, and one which goes to the heart of this dilemma. What is the social coherence of the claim? i.e. How resilient are the value-exchanges that support it? How incentivised are stakeholders to supply legal, decent, honest and truthful information?  If power is distributed too much to the top or the bottom of the assurance system, or even captured by the middle, credibility will be imperilled.

There are major clues in this report that the way to unglue this matrix lies in interoperable assurance networks, which can overlay individual supply-chains, and that the credibility platform, and the reassurance processes that sit on that platform will need to become increasingly separate, and increasingly specialised, over time.

Brands are fighting hard for their Credibility. Certification systems will need to offer them ever stronger Reassurance.

In addition to Patagonia’s 4Rs – Reduce, Repair, Reuse, Recycle, I think its about time we introduced a new first R – Refuse.

We all have the will, but possibly not always the willpower, to refuse the efforts of marketers – including the iconic Patagonia – to persuade us to buy more stuff.

Just because an economy needs growth, does not mean that that growth must come at the expense of the earth.

If we are to be persuaded to pay good money for intangible benefits, then the less tangible, the less resource intensive and the less energy intensive these are, the better.  Recycling is a safety net, Reuse is vital, Repair is good, Reduction is great; but Refusal is better.  Reduction slows the cogs, but selective Refusal, is in the words of James Tobin – a little grit in the wheels of financial capitalism.

Refusal steals value from ‘the system of destruction’.  It mutualises brand value.  And this approach to stealing back value, this unconsumption, is well worth paying for…

If we can start to reward creation, not destruction we can find ways to pay for people not plunder.

By accurately and effectively valuing the life story of products, including their shared production and their common ownership, environmental capitalism can evolve into social capitalism.  The pieces of the product we end up paying tomorrow will be the pieces we steal today.

The time we invest in care and repair, in creativity and choice-editing, in individualising and socialising our choices – this is the value we can steal back from the system.  By adhering to the five Rs we create social value.  These will be the unconsumptive values that brand owners will seek offer us back in the decades ahead. And they cost nothing. So steal with pride.

Become a Refusenik.

The colours of this web-site – the dark blue and brownish-grey – have enormous significance for him. The blue  - a sort of muddied ultramarine or ultraviolet colour – echoes a stage-set he created years ago and evokes the colour just before dawn – a time when the despair of night ends and the hope of day begins. In his mind, this transitional colour has a luminescence – it conjures memories of gold, painted to burn behind the blue. Likewise, the grey colour brings him memories of an experience walking on a dorset beach across slabby, ankle-breaking rocks.  It evokes solidity, calm and a sort of impermeable truthfulness, and a very particular rock.

When I look at the web-site, I feel a mix of emotions.  I do, precisely, feel a combination of tension and calm he is seeking to evoke, but I also see a certain murkiness – an indeterminacy. A kind of open-closed tension, in that I am not sure whether or not I am invited in. In short, we disagree, or more accurately, meaning has been transformed.

The point of this little diversion on colour is that I am encountering exactly the same issue on a writing course I’m undertaking.  We were recently asked to answer the question “What is a story?”.  Having resisted the temptation to respond with “What is a question?” I eventually managed to produce a sensible, constrained response.

But in doing so, I became viscerally aware, in a way I never have before, of the paradoxical nature of language.  Hemingway is credited with writing the shortest short story, which goes simply, in its entirety:

“For sale: baby shoes, never worn”.

We can debate whether this is a story – when all of the action take place in the imagination, and I would, and did.  But the very act of considering this question brings us into contact with the most fundamental truth of language.

Language is both personal and social.  It is both symbolic and systemic.  Language is a public private partnership.

This is the paradox at the heart of creativity – to sketch a space in which meaning can be exchanged, but never unified.

Language holds reality. But only very loosely. The act of creation and the act of consumption borrow a loosely-shared lexicon which is wholly insufficient for the task of communicating experience, let alone higher truths.  But this is its joy.

It’s true, as Herman Hesse says, that “words do not express thoughts very well”.  But I would argue that they don’t have to.  Meaning lives in the gaps.  Meaning lives in our personal punctuation. We must give it space.

To disagree with the words of Somerset Maugham.

“Only disconnect”

And see what comes.